


Ten past eight

by horselizard



Category: Red Dwarf
Genre: Accidental anthropology rant, Action/Adventure, Disasters, Effectively almost genocide, Gap Filler, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Headcanon, Humor, Season/Series 08, Seriously dubious pseudoscience
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-07
Updated: 2013-06-06
Packaged: 2017-12-14 04:14:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 3
Words: 6,221
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/832607
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/horselizard/pseuds/horselizard
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The comprehensive, nay definitive, explanation of what happened after the Series VIII cliffhanger, with street names, post offices, and all the loose ends tied up and everything.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Good God, this was a headfuck. Having attempted it, I can entirely forgive Doug Naylor for never bothering to explain away all this shit in canon.
> 
> If any plot holes remain, for heaven's sake tell me...
> 
> Originally drafted over Christmas 2012. EDITING IS HARD.

**20.08:**

“You’ve forgotten one thing,” Arnold J. Rimmer murmured in his fever-dream. “Only the _good_ die young.”

As last words went, they might have worked better for someone who hadn’t already died once.

His eyes rolled back into his head as the flames of the disintegrating mining ship licked around his body.

 

**20.07:**

The _Wildfire_ bloomed into existence in a majestic white flash, then screamed pell-mell through the vacuum of space as its pilot wrestled with its controls.

Arnold J. “Ace” Rimmer could make out a gigantic red ship looming in his flight path, an unmistakable crimson ex-mining ship the size of a city, wallowing beached in the uninhabited reaches of Deep Space. Uncharacteristically, he did not mutter “Oh god, not another one of _these_ realities.” He did not bend the ear of his cockpit computer with his usual tirade (as she had long tired of hearing, it always made him feel a horrible mixture of contempt, self-pity and – worryingly – envy). He did not plot a course for the nearest likely-looking planet and make his exit as discreetly as possible, swallowing down the aftertaste of his unpleasant ambivalence.

He didn’t do any of this, because he was somewhat preoccupied with the way the cockpit was filling with choking black smoke.

What’s more, the cockpit computer was slowly melting into the footwell.

He squinted through the smoke, and his stomach somersaulted sickeningly as he spotted the trail of chalky white goop creeping its way along the underside of the windshield. It was only a matter of minutes before the hull breached. He peered out at the fast approaching _Red Dwarf_ again, and straightened the _Wildfire_ up so it was on course to hit one of the inexplicably-open landing bays. Actually, his panicked brain registered, the mining ship didn’t look like it was in such great shape itself, but this was his only chance. Just his smegging luck.

The blast from the sticky grenade itself hadn’t damaged the structural integrity of the _Wildfire_ , but as he had made his getaway, painfully pushing the ship up to demi-lightspeed in preparation for engaging the jump drive, the computer readouts had started showing something alarming.

Like all Space Corps test ships, the _Wildfire_ had been fitted prior to its first jump with a multiply-reinforced outer hull, to ensure that it could withstand not only impacts and high temperatures, but also any mix of chemicals which might trigger corrosion. However, in the _Wildfire_ ’s home dimension, there was one highly reactive compound which, it just so happened, had never been discovered. And which, it just so happened, was wildly popular in pretty much every _other_ dimension for the rather specialised task of building sticky grenades.

 _Just my smegging luck_ , Rimmer continued to babble, mantra-like, as he wrestled his creaking, groaning, disintegrating ship towards the cargo bay doors. He had seen it on the external monitor, eating its way across the hull from the small scorched dent where the grenade had let off its charge, feeding on the metal of his ship and spreading across the natty orange paint job in an ever-expanding white froth. In response to his horrified shrieking, the cockpit computer had helpfully told him the name of this thrice-smegged chemical compound from hell. It was a complicated name, but with the RAM upgrade which his light bee uplink represented, he had no difficulty committing it to memory. And with the tiny fraction of his consciousness which wasn’t occupied with steering a dying ship and babbling _just my smegging luck_ , he was preparing his last word. A word which, even in Arnold J. Rimmer’s skewed list of priorities, was more worthy of death-rattled cursing than gazpacho soup:

Caesiumfrancolithicmixyalibidiumrixydixydoxydexydroxide.

 

**20.05:**

“Where the smeg’s Rimmer?!”

“Who the hell cares, bud?”

Lister shot the Cat a look. “Okay, so he’s a lying, cheating, weaselly, small-minded coward and if he wasn’t such a dishonourable scumbag we wouldn’t have ended up in the Brig.” Everyone stared at him, waiting for the expected ‘but’, which seemed to be a long time coming. His features twisted briefly in confusion, before he recovered himself. “ _But_ , we sent him in here in the first place. We can’t just leave him.”

“But there’s no sign of him anywhere,” sighed Kochanski.

“Then maybe he went back through the mirror, and we just missed him! Come on,” Lister exclaimed, wheeling round to lead them all back to the Captain’s quarters.

“But Mr Lister, sir, there’s no telling how long that mirror link will hold!” Kryten insisted. “If we go back to our universe now, we might be trapped there permanently. Well, for an extremely brief value of ‘permanently’, given that the ship would disintegrate around us in mere hours and we would all be blown apart into the vacuum of space.”

“Hey, Novelty Condom Head?” said Cat. “If that happens… is it likely to bust the seams of my suit? Break it to me gently, bud, but I have to know…”

Kochanski sighed again, but she was well used to carrying stubbornly on in the face of blind stupidity. “And even if we found out the formula for the antidote from someone in this universe, the minute we transported it back through the mirror, it’d just turn back into the formula for the corrosive.”

“Yeah, and how long after we’d sent him in here to fetch it did we work _that_ one out?” Lister snarled. “Come _on_. We’re the posse. No smeghead left behind.”

Kochanski, Kryten and the Cat had no choice but to start after him, wishing as they occasionally did that his moral compass weren’t _quite_ so finely honed. As Kryten brought up the rear, readying himself to step through the link, he noted with some alarm that the image in the mirror was becoming distorted. He hurried through just as the link closed, and saw, just as he’d feared, that the mirror universe machine was starting to melt as the corrosion ate into it.

The vending machine, which had seen them go, turned a blind eye to their return.

 

**20.09:**

A flotilla of green and blue ships, streaming through the void of Space.

Every ship’s occupants hoped to hell that their vessel hadn’t been infected with the micro-organism.

Every ship’s occupants’ hopes were going to be dashed.

 

**20.11:**

The mission of mercy had started out badly, and only got worse. On arrival back in the Captain’s recovery room, they had been met by a chaos of flames, smoke and warning lights emanating from the nearest corridor. Not fancying their chances, they had scurried away through the Captain’s suite of rooms, hoping to find either a back entrance or a cowering Rimmer. Neither were forthcoming; faced with the choice of braving the inferno of the corridor or barricading themselves in fruitlessly with the sparking, popping mirror universe machine, they were getting increasingly frantic.

Lister finally managed to make contact with Holly - _their_ Holly. The main ship’s computer had started to fragment and crash as the corrosion had eaten into his circuits, but their faithful three-million-year-old companion’s mainframe was hosted well out of its path for the moment, and he had hacked himself in to as many of the systems as he safely could. “Holly, where’s Rimmer?”

“Mr Lister, _sir_ ,” Kryten wailed, “wherever he is, unless he _was_ still in the mirror universe, he’s about to suffer exactly the same fate as us!”

Lister sighed. “Then at least he won’t die alone.”

Holly intoned phlegmatically, “Arnold Rimmer is in Landing Bay 29.”

“He’s in the _cargo_ bays? What the smeg’s he doing down there? And how’d he get there so fast?”

Kochanski puffed out her cheeks; since there was nothing they could do about their impending death, she thought she might as well waste a few seconds indulging her guilty penchant for _I-told-you-so_ s one last time. “Lister, did Second Technicians ever have to, say, file status reports concerning, I don’t know, the spaceworthiness or otherwise of, for example, the emergency escape shuttles?”

Lister stared at her, and a feeling crept over him which was horribly familiar. “Let’s get down there. He sure as hell _won’t_ die alone. Cos I’m gonna smeggin’ _kill_ him.”

 

**20.12:**

They raced down the flaming corridor, their paces quickened by a twin mixture of hope (maybe, just _maybe_ , Rimmer had ‘found’ a functioning escape vessel, and hadn’t yet taken off in it) and fury (in three cases, at Lister, for believing for a second that an honourless weasel like Rimmer was worthy of the “no person left behind” rule). Then, the Cat stumbled over something, and somersaulted elegantly to land in a crouch, his long coat sweeping along the floor.

“Aw man, now I got soot all over my coat-tails!” he grumbled. “At least black goes with everything...”

“Oh my God, it’s a body!” Kochanski yelled. She felt for the jugular to check for a pulse, squinting through the smoke, her hand landing in a congealed mass of blood. _Must have been a head wound,_ she thought with a sinking feeling, fighting down the impulse to retch, _and_ what _a head wound_. “No pulse. Stone dead.”

Kryten rushed over to help her turn the body over onto its back, and as Lister craned over it and the Cat peered distractedly across, there was a collective gasp. In their heart of hearts, they all knew, it couldn’t really have been anyone else. But blind panic and desperation had stopped them from admitting it. And of all the gruesome, bloody deaths they had witnessed in their treacherous travels across the hazards of Deep Space, this one was so simple, so goreless, so unspectacular, so thoroughly un-spacelike that it couldn’t have been more shocking. The death not only of one of their posse, but of their last hope.

Kochanski was the first to finally pull herself together. “Hang on – why on Earth did Holly say he was in the cargo bay?”

Lister froze, his mind racing. He shook his head, dreamlike, as the pieces fell into place. “No way,” he breathed, slowly straightening from his half-crouch over Rimmer’s body. “No. Smegging. WAY!”

And once again, the other three had no chance but to follow him as he suddenly set off full tilt in the direction of Landing Bay 29.

 

**20.24:**

Kochanski, Kryten and the Cat were utterly breathless, and even more utterly bewildered. The first five minutes of their high-speed journey had been taken up with bewilderment as to what the smeg had got into Lister. Blind hope was the top theory, blind hope that Holly’s words had contained some truth, rather than just being the baseless rantings of a senile computer on board a ship whose systems were fast melting into so much scrambled circuitry. But if that was so, who on Earth was Lister expecting to find down there? The original hologram of Rimmer had died on board Starbug, they all knew...

Then the focus of their bewilderment had changed as they found themselves pounding down corridors which were less and less corroded and flame-filled the closer they got to the cargo bays. This made even less sense than Holly’s pronouncement – surely since the source of the corrosion, the escape pod, was in a landing bay, it should be getting worse?

Lister skidded up to the airlock door of Landing Bay 29, his heart in his mouth. As he thumped the release button impatiently, waiting for the repressurisation sequence to initiate, what he saw through the observation window made his heart sink down to his boots. A smoking, gutted chassis, nothing of it remaining but support struts, half-molten plastic and charred fabric. With all its metal eaten away, only the very imaginative or very desperate could possibly have recognised it as the _Wildfire_.

“Smeg!” he cursed, tears springing to his eyes as his last faint hope was dashed.

“Sir, what’s going on?” Kryten peered over his shoulder. “What _is_ that craft? How did it get here?”

“Ace’s ship,” Lister spat, with a certainty that seemed ludicrously unfounded to the others. “I thought... perhaps there was a chance... but the micro-organism must have got to it too... and it looks like he’s...” He started to sob, collapsing against the wall and sliding down it in defeated grief.

“But that wouldn’t make sense,” murmured Kochanski, her mind working overtime. “Haven’t you noticed? This corridor is practically unaffected. In fact, the most likely explanation is that the corrosion’s been _reversed_...”

“...by something emanating from that ship,” Kryten exclaimed, hardly daring to hope that they might now be in the clear.

Lister _hadn’t_ noticed. He stared up at his surroundings, shellshocked. “Oh my God. He actually did it. I don’t know how, but he did it. I sent him off to be a hero,” he babbled, staring at his feet, “and now he’s died saving us...”

Finally the cargo bay systems completed their airlock repressurisation sequence. The door hissed open, and a body burst through it and tumbled onto the floor alongside Lister. A tall, thin man clad in a charred silver flight suit, his once floppy, strawberry-blond hair singed into a short, dark frizz, his hands out in front of him, smoke-blackened, and still twitching.

“Oh my God, Rimmer!” Lister shrieked, scrambling up onto his knees and leaning over the new arrival, feverishly grabbing at his shoulders to try and turn him over. “Are you OK? Rimmer, is that you, is that really you? Oh God, please, let him be OK... please let it be _our_ Rimmer...”

He finally succeeded in tipping the man over onto his back, knocking the burnt remains of his wig to the floor. Although the face he stared down into was blackened with soot, streaked with grime and tears, eyes wide and unblinking, he knew in his heart, he could _swear_ , that this was _his_ Rimmer, and that he was going to be OK.

“Rimmer, thank God!” he wept joyfully, afraid to hurt the man by hugging him, but unwilling to let go of his shoulders. “You did it! You saved us! Oh, you can’t imagine how glad I am to see you again, man...”

The shellshocked Ace slowly came to his senses, blinked a few times, and the grinning face looming over him finally swam into focus.

“You smegging bastard,” he rasped, and he slumped into unconsciousness.

 

**20.10:**

The _Wildfire_ caromed towards the landing bay, trailing a plume of smoke and flames, its outer surface festooned with streaks of the frothy white substance. The bay doors were slowly closing as per the _Dwarf_ ’s automated post-launch sequence, but this problem wasn’t high on Rimmer’s list of priorities. _This_ problem, after all, had a solution, in that the bay doors were also slowly blackening as they were eaten away. It wasn’t a perfect solution, in that it caused a whole lot of other problems: if the doors were eaten away completely, the artificial grav of the landing bay would have hard work hanging on to the craft once it docked; if the _rest_ of the _Dwarf_ was also being eaten away, he was smegged regardless; but it _was_ a solution.

And, the more he thought about it (to what little extent he was able to think beyond his blind panic), the more he could see positive aspects to his situation. For example, the corrosive substance had finally caused a breach in his cockpit, which was bad, obviously. But as all of the air had been sucked out of the craft’s frontsection (along with most of the junk he kept there), his vision was no longer filled with choking black smoke. Although the smoke obviously hadn’t been a problem breathing-wise, it had made it really rather difficult to pilot a disintegrating ship gradually losing altitude as he aimed it towards a rapidly narrowing target. There was, he reflected, always a bright side.

Oh, God. Fear was making him delirious.

The Plexiglas viewscreen finally imploded, showering Rimmer with tiny shards of debris, when he was just a few clicks away from his target. He let out a kamikaze scream, praying to the gods he didn’t believe in that whatever was keeping him and his flimsy, charred safety webbing attached to his craft would hold out just a few seconds longer, and tugged desperately at the sluggish, unresponsive steering column. Something had to give, or he would miss his mark.

Something did give. The twisted metal of the steering column came away in his hands, and sparks shot out of the exposed cables, fusing the circuitry together. And by some fluke, the resulting short-circuit caused the rear retros to fire off the last of their fuel in a final hurrah.

Rimmer screamed, and screamed, and screamed, as the uplift from the retros finally nudged the craft back on course. It lurched drunkenly towards the gap between the rapidly disintegrating doors, its underside smashing into the lower door as it crested through. Tiny splinters of red metal followed it down into the bay as it crashed to the floor and scraped to a halt, sparks flying. The impact disgorged a shower of microscopic white particles, which scattered swiftly through the airless atmosphere looking for a home.

Out of his mind with fear, and operating purely on instinct, Rimmer tore away the remains of his safety webbing and threw himself clear of the cockpit, which was now fiercely ablaze. As he slowly came to his senses, he came to the unbelievable conclusion that he had, somehow, survived. He let out a long, low groan, and prepared himself for a slow, painful crawl towards the airlock door.

Sprawled out on the floor, waiting until he was capable of moving, he stared unseeingly up at the bay ceiling, where molecules of the white compound were reacting vigorously with the black sludge of corrosion, multiplying and spreading at a phenomenal rate, leaving trails of pristine red metal in their wake.


	2. Chapter 2

Kryten had wisely elected to keep out of the confused tangle of arguments and explanations, concentrating instead on gently mopping the semi-conscious hologram’s brow, having found a first aid kit mounted by the airlock door. They had quickly established that the corrosion had indeed been definitively reversed and that Rimmer was suffering from little more serious than shock. Therefore, since nobody was in mortal danger, they got down to the important business of haranguing Lister into telling them what the smeg was going on, and then shouting at him when he admitted all the secrets he’d been keeping.

“So let me get this straight. _That’s_ Goalpost Head?”

“And you let everyone who was close to him think he was dead? How _could_ you, Dave?”

“Look, Krissie -”

“Yeah, bud, what’s wrong with you? Getting our hopes up like that?”

Lister was relieved when Rimmer groaned and opened his eyes, which prompted the squabbling to die down. His relief didn’t last for long.

“It _is_ you, isn’t it,” Rimmer said with distaste, struggling to his feet. “ _I_ heard you. No other dimension’s Lister would be stupid enough to spin his crewmates that story about the knight from the AR machine. And you seem to have gained a Kochanski. How delightful for you.”

“Came from a parallel universe, hi,” Kochanski smiled weakly.

“Well, miladdo, so much for your genius plan to get shot of me once and for all.” He peered through the observation window at the wreck of his craft. “By the looks of things, actually, you’re stuck with me, _actually_.”

Lister’s mind was reeling. He was very much out of practice at discerning the nuggets of meaning from the apparent non-sequiturs Rimmer’s mistrustful, misconceiving mind was wont to produce. “Wh... what d’you mean? I never had a plan. What d’you mean, stuck with you?”

“Well, it doesn’t look like _that’s_ going anywhere in a hurry, does it? – may its demented, drippy, honey-voiced cockpit computer rest in peace. So, unless you’ve got a spare dimension-hopping craft lying around anywhere, that’s it, finito.” He crossed his arms, managing to look simultaneously triumphant and utterly-smegged-off.

“You mean the ship? We must be able to fix it up somehow. We’ve _got_ to! I mean, you’re Ace Rimmer!” Lister gesticulated dumbly, frustrated that Rimmer didn’t seem to realise the scale of his responsibilities, not even after they had taken the trip to the graveyard of light bees. “Do you really mean to say you’re breaking the chain?”

“Of _course_ I’m breaking the smegging chain!” Rimmer exploded. “I’m not Ace Rimmer. I was _never_ Ace Rimmer! None of us were! You can’t just take someone whose life history branched off _waaay_ before any of that cadet-training, test-pilot-heroics smeg, give ‘em a light bee upgrade and a poncy wig, then tell ‘em to bugger off and get on with it.”

“But,” Lister floundered, “you had that training from the old Ace... you managed to kill that knight, an’ all!”

“Oh, one rogue AR knight, one lucky shot, that proves I’m ready, does it? That makes up for years and years and _years_ of being _Bonehead_ Rimmer, does it? That qualifies me to take on crazed GELFs and rogue droids and psychopathic rebel simulants, does it? That means I’ll be a shoo-in in a dogfight against a whole _squadron_ of agonoid fighter pilots, does it?” Rimmer was apoplectic now, leaning in so close to Lister’s face that he could almost feel the hologrammatic spittle flying from his mouth before it dissipated into light particles. Suddenly, his voice dropped dangerously low and quiet. “Why, you mutton-headed son of a cretin, did you think there were so _many_ light bees orbiting that planet?”

Lister stared at him uncomprehendingly for a second, then a chilling silence fell as the penny dropped. It was broken by Cat murmuring “Well, you got it right about his dad, at least.”

Rimmer turned to him with a questioning frown, but Kryten quickly cut in. “I really don’t think this is the time, Mr Cat...”

“I’m sorry, Rimmer,” Lister told his shoes. “I really wasn’t thinking of it like that. I wasn’t trying to get rid of you, I swear. I thought I was doing the right thing. I mean... the universe _needs_ an Ace Rimmer...”

“No, it smegging well doesn’t!” Rimmer scoffed. “Only the kind of blinkered, egotistical, jumped-up, self-aggrandising prick that the first one was would think that. Intergalactic space hero defeating the baddies and rescuing the damsels in distress? I ask you! When has the universe _ever_ been as simple as that? How d’you know the damsels aren’t serial-murdering double-agents? How d’you know the tiny beleaguered pocket of resistance against a GELF onslaught isn’t being beleaguered because _they_ invaded the GELFs in the first place and tried to take their land? How the _smeg_ do you pick a side when you dimension-jump into the middle of a civil war?! These things are _never_ black and white, good versus evil, poor innocent peasantfolk whose only hope is for a white knight in shining armour to swoop in and save the day.”

“The military historian speaks,” Lister muttered. “Rimmer, man, stop making excuses! Being Ace wasn’t _all_ about leaping in guns blazing and fighting the baddies. What about rescuing sinking ships, saving innocent lives? Not even _you_ can argue with that. For smeg’s sake, you even did it just now! We’d all have been dead by now if it wasn’t for you!”

Now it was Rimmer’s turn to boggle. “What are you drivelling about? I didn’t do anything!”

“Mr Rimmer, sir,” Kryten interjected helpfully, “before you arrived, _Red Dwarf_ had been infected with a highly corrosive micro-organism. You were carrying the antidote. We had assumed you were, heroically, responding to our distress call.”

“What?” Rimmer looked bewildered. “God, no! I didn’t have any antidote! I was just trying to land somewhere before the _Wildfire_ was completely eaten away by...” He trailed off as the pieces suddenly fell into place. “Oh, good lord. It was the caesiumfrancolithicmixyalibidiumrixydixydoxydexy-smegging-droxide, wasn’t it?”

“It does sound likely that such a compound could have reversed the corroding effect, yes,” said Kryten, as the others exchanged blank looks.

“Look, as thrilling as all this is, shouldn’t we try and contact the others to tell them it’s safe to come back on board?” Kochanski interrupted.

“ ‘Others’? What ‘others’?” Rimmer exclaimed, affronted at being kept out of the loop. Kochanski ignored him and concentrated on trying to get hold of Holly.

“Holly, can you put us in contact with the escape vessels?”

“Oh, gawd,” said Holly, “I was wondering when you were going to ask me that.”

“Oh, smeg,” exclaimed Lister, “you don’t mean _they_ got infected with the micro-organism too?”

“I’m afraid so, Dave,” replied Holly. “Corrosion levels became critical at approximately ten minutes past eight. There was nothing anyone could have done.”

“I’m sure all of this nonsensical jabbering will eventually mean something to me,” said Rimmer, “but in the meantime, just one question: how _many_ ‘others’?”

“One thousand, one hundred and sixty-seven,” Holly replied.

Rimmer winced, and rubbed his temples. “And they all died.”

“Yes.”

“And I had the antidote that would have saved them.”

“Yes.”

“There we smegging well go, then,” Rimmer exclaimed. “Bonehead does it again. I rest my case. Thus ends the illustrious career of Ace Rimmer: not with a bang but with a colossal cock-up.”

“Oh, Rimmer, c’mon, you can’t blame yourself for this – your ship was on fire, for smeg’s sake!” Lister pleaded. But the hologram was already reaching inside his chest, fiddling with his light bee. After a few seconds, he managed to disconnect the uplink, and was suddenly neat and resplendent in a blue tunic and trousers, his H back in position on his forehead.

“Hm, that’s new,” he murmured appreciatively, looking down at his uniform. “Right! Well, like I say, looks like you’re stuck with me. And, since it sounds like an awful lot’s been going on since I left, you’d better fill me in on the basics so that I can effectively resume command of the ship.”

“Er, actually, Mr Rimmer, that task would fall to Miss Kochanski, as the highest-ranking member of the crew.”

All eyes briefly turned to the highest-ranking member of the crew, who hadn’t been saying much since Holly had brought the unfortunate news, and was looking rather pale. Lister was feeling pretty shocked by the news himself, but he had to admit that his dimension hadn’t been very kind to Kochanski, on the whole. He couldn’t help wondering whether the same things – regaining the _Dwarf_ and its crew, being forced into prison and on Canary missions, then suddenly seeing all of her shipmates wiped out yet again – would have happened to her if she’d stayed where she belonged.

“Ah, but you seem to be forgetting the delightful funeral you held for me, in which you so kindly awarded me a promotion to First Officer,” Rimmer said smugly, rocking on his heels.

“Forget it, man,” Lister muttered, “I take back everything I said then.”

“Too late, Lister,” Rimmer smirked, “no take-backsies. Oh!” he murmured absently, “I wonder if that holo-lamp’s still in my old quarters...?”

“ ‘Ere,” Holly butted in, “you did what?”

“We gave him a posthumous promotion,” Lister sighed. “Except it wasn’t posthumous. Well, except it _was_ , obviously.”

“You what? You can’t do that. You’re not authorised. Doesn’t count.”

Rimmer stopped mid-rock, his face falling. “So _she’s_ in charge?” he spat. “Oh, fan-smegging-tastic. Why couldn’t we have got her from a universe where she got bumped down to Third Technician for being a snooty cow?”

Lister groaned, and covered his eyes. Krissie really didn’t deserve this. What a posse she was stuck with now.

“All right then, _Miss_ Kochanski _ma’am_ ,” Rimmer said as he saluted her, rolling his eyes even more extravagantly than his wrist, “what’s the plan?”

“Bloody hell, Rimmer,” Kochanski moaned, “I don’t know – I’ve had quite a traumatic day, in case it had escaped your notice!”

“So have I, but you don’t hear _me_ complaining,” Rimmer replied. Surprisingly, he _hadn’t_ been complaining. It was probably the invigorating effect of all the petty argument-picking – it was marvellously refreshing, after two or three tiresome years of having to be smooth and charming. “ _Clearly_ I’m more suited to the demands of being Acting Captain than you are. Well, I won’t have to put up with you pulling rank for long. I’ll pass that smegging astronavigation exam, just you wait. I’ll be in charge before you can say caesiumfrancomixy... caesiumrixylithic... caesiumlithibidium...”

Rimmer frowned, and fumbled around inside his chest again, to no avail. “Oh, smeggy bollocks. All right, it might take a _little_ longer than that,” he finished stiffly, before turning on his heel and marching off in search of a quarters he could bagsy.

Lister, Kochanski, Kryten and Cat sagged in his wake, staring wordlessly at the floor, in equal measures exhausted and exasperated by the tirade they had just been subjected to. Rimmer was back, all right.

“Coulda been worse,” Cat muttered flatly. “We coulda ended up with _two_ of them.”


	3. Chapter 3

Lister plodded with a heavy heart up the steps to the Obs Dome. It wasn’t as he remembered it, but now that he’d finally been able to explore beyond Floor 13, not much of the ship was. He’d thought this would be the right place for it when he remembered all the times he’d come up here in the past, but the unfamiliarity of the layout made it worse somehow, blurring his memories.

He was clutching a handful of shoddily framed photographs, the only ones he could find. It wasn’t enough, but he’d wanted to do _something_ to commemorate the losses, and this time around there were no little canisters of dust to eject solemnly into space. He’d asked Krissie if she wanted to come with him, thinking it might help her deal with things, but she’d said she couldn’t face it, and gone off to grieve in private.

She had just about been holding it together until they’d finally reached the Drive Room and got Holly to run a complete report on the ship, trying to work out where the inmates of the Tank had got to. And that was when they’d discovered the stomach-churning news that Rimmer hadn’t quite managed to save _everybody_ on board.

Floor 13 had been the first section of the hull to finally breach under the strain of the corrosion. Torn open like a paper bag, it had lost all its occupants to the unforgiving vacuum of space. Only one thing had stopped the entire ship depressurising and being blown apart: as the hull had begun to buckle and crumple, a fluke of physics had caused the small moon embedded close by in the ship’s underside to become wedged in the widening breach, crushing what remained of the Tank beyond all recognition, but stabilising the integrity of the craft once more.

Lister had felt sick. They might have been psychopathic criminals, and God only knew how they all would have got along as the sole remaining members of the onboard community, but they didn’t deserve _that_. Hollister had left them to die, he and the others had taken their chances in the escape crafts, but the inmates had never _had_ a chance. Krissie had left the room without a word, and it had been hours before she’d reappeared.

Lister sighed. They _needed_ Krissie to stay strong, to take charge: not because she was an officer or any of that petty smeg, but because she was the only one of them who was halfway competent. And it wasn’t fair, her having to feel responsible for all the rest of them even while grief and trauma meant she could barely take responsibility for herself. He wished he knew how to help her. Pathetically, the only thing he could think of was running her a bath.

He sat down, and laid out his meagre collection of photos. Kryten had done a good job on the memorial stone; it was surprising how many useful groinal attachments he had squirrelled away. Just like the first time he had had to do this, he barely knew most of the people depicted, but there was one picture he lingered over.

It was the only one he could find: an unflattering prison mugshot of a grumpy, glowering young man, his mouth set in a thin line, his nostrils flaring in indignation. Lister stared at the image, trying to put out of his mind the horrific visual memory of what that young man would soon become: a blank-eyed, blood-streaked corpse in a smoke-filled corridor. The poor goit had never had much luck, Lister reflected, in _any_ lifetime.

He wondered why he had been so deeply affected by the resurrected Rimmer’s death. He’d still been the same selfish weasel he remembered from all those years ago – but they’d had a few laughs, hadn’t they, in prison? At least two, if he remembered right. They’d banded together in adversity, been a team – instead of being enemies like he and the original Rimmer had always been, their petty squabbles expanding to fill the vastness of the empty mining ship.

But, no – that wasn’t right. He remembered the times he and Rimmer had talked long into the night, sometimes in this very same (well, not _quite_ the same) Obs Dome. He’d felt sorry for the smegger, even come to _understand_ him a little – inasmuch as anyone could understand the warped logic of his mass of neuroses. Maybe... maybe it was that empathy and understanding that had made him be patient with the new Rimmer, give him a chance, wait for him to show signs of becoming the person he had, by degrees, come to know and... and, yes, like.

Lister looked up into the star-pinpricked blackness of space, his head feeling clearer. He was mourning Rimmer’s death, yes, but most of all he was mourning the potential that had been lost - the potential that he knew was there from all the years he had spent with his hologram. But now, that hologram was back, here to stay, and it was time to give _him_ a chance. Maybe his strong feelings were his subconscious telling him not to grieve what he’d lost, but to make the best of what he still had.

He heard footsteps clacking smartly up the stairs behind him, and turned round with a hopeful smile.

“So this is the famous memorial garden, is it? Kryten told me what you were doing. I don’t know, Listy. Sometimes I worry you _have_ gone space-crazy without my stabilising influence.” Rimmer smirked, his hands behind his back adding to his air of superiority. “These people never cared about you when they were alive, so why fuss over them now that they’re dead?”

Lister’s smile wavered slightly. “Come on, man, it’s the principle of the thing.”

“Oh, yawnorama. Spare me the Mr Morality act, you hypocrite.” Suddenly Rimmer’s eye was drawn to the photo in Lister’s hand. “What the smeg is that? Couldn’t you have picked something more flattering?”

“There weren’t any others,” Lister mumbled, putting it down hastily.

Rimmer peered at it more closely, and an awkward silence descended. “That’s _him_ , isn’t it?”

“Yeah, that’s him,” Lister replied guardedly, his smile now just a fond memory.

Rimmer surveyed the rest of the paltry display, tight-lipped. “And this is it, is it? Your monument to the dead of the crew? Finished?”

“Oh, smeg,” Lister groaned, as he realised where this was going.

“Well, that’s just peachy, isn’t it? That’s just absolutely smegging peachy. It’s bad enough knowing you’re the least favourite brother, you know. No need to rub in that I’m the least favourite _me_.”

“Rimmer, _listen_...”

“I _knew_ you wouldn’t do this properly. Since when have you been any good at respecting the dead?” Rimmer spat. “It’s just as well I came.”

He withdrew his hands from behind his back to reveal a photo in an elaborate gilded frame: the photo he was most proud of, the one that had been used to declare him Technician of the Month. He positioned it with ceremonial precision parallel to the memorial stone, standing out among the haphazard collection of oddly-sized photos in cheap, mismatched frames.

He bowed his head briefly, then executed a flawless Double-Rimmer, and stood in silence for a moment, Lister fighting against the urge to facepalm. Then the hologram looked down at the second-to-last human alive with a scowl. “I’ll leave you to it, shall I? I’m sure you’ve still got plenty of grieving to do for _that_ Rimmer. The _better_ one. The one you wish you’d ended up with.”

As Rimmer turned and marched back down the stairs, Lister stifled a groan of frustration, his sanguine philosophical mood shattered. He glared at the photos of the two Rimmers side by side, but his annoyance still softened when he looked across from the smug, false pose of the Technician of the Month to the candidly human expression of his newly incarcerated double.

He sighed yet again, and for a brief, treacherous moment he thought maybe Rimmer was right - maybe he was being unfair. But one thing was certain, he reflected wryly: natural as it was to think well of a person who had died, it was _so_ much easier when that person wasn’t still capable of barging in and ruining your day.

He slowly got to his feet, and left the memorial garden.


End file.
